Matthew Walker's carefully researched Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England explores the ways in which a number of elite Englishmen engaged with architecture. Walker's principal subjects are John Evelyn, Roger North, Robert Hooke, Alexander Edward, William and John Talman, Martin Lister, William Halifax, Francis Vernon, and Christopher Wren. Chosen for the insights to be gained from the documentation they generated, these men were all born and died between the 1620s and 1720s. Mostly London based, these gentlemen engaged with the world through a largely metropolitan and self-consciously English lens, acquiring historical fame for purposeful engagement with architecture alongside other accomplishments. The historical sources they left behind make a coherent basis for an inquiry into the nature of architectural knowledge as a male intellectual pursuit in late Stuart England.

Walker's study is refreshingly wide ranging in its attention to the activity of these men as architectural writers, collectors, travelers, and antiquarians, as well as practical gentlemen architects keen to ensure the buildings they designed would stand up. Walker's alertness to the diverse ways in which learned gentlemen engaged with architecture yields a rich array of insights into architectural knowledge formation in late Stuart England. An admirable quality of the book is its care in locating architectural knowledge in time. Mindful of how earlier generations weighed on these men—notably the authority of Vitruvius, the example of Inigo Jones, and the circulation of architectural authors in print in England since the Renaissance—Walker wisely refrains from stepping forward into the very different context of Hanoverian England.

Sensitive to England's inferior relationship to architectural learning in the wealthier courts and churches of Europe, especially France and Italy, Walker shows the degree to which learned Englishmen sought sound knowledge as the basis for developing architectural fabric fitting their own nation. Walker is especially interested in the question of architectural innovation. He seeks to explain how specific pieces of architecture arose, focusing on Hooke's anatomy theater for the College of Physicians (1671–1678), North's Gateway to the Middle Temple (1684), and Wren's western portico on St. Paul's (1685–1690). As settings for the pursuit of medicine, law, and national glory, these buildings were designed to equip a modern city run by learned professionals. One might have hoped that Walker would have said more about London as an imperial metropole and how the onset of empire framed architectural expectations for England.

Walker's focus on the high-minded inevitably limits this study to a rather particular intellectual world. He does not include any clergy or military men. Exploring techniques of architectural learning among the self-consciously well educated also excludes artisan architects from serious consideration. This limits the degree to which the material presented can be said to explain architecture in England more generally. Walker notes that contemporaries used the term regular to refer to modern forms of architecture characterized by flat surfaces and symmetrical facades. In creating this regular architecture, artisans, and architects engaged with what is known as the “orders”—that ordered yet playful set of elements drawn from the variety of columns known from the ancient world.

As Walker notes, no one spoke of “classical” architecture in this generation. The term was generally reserved for literature before the later eighteenth century. Yet Walker is determined to uncover the trajectory of a classical tradition in architecture in England. Employing a concept alien to the keywords of the intellectual culture under discussion is more problematic than Walker allows. Rather than contemplating a continuous classical tradition, contemporaries regarded architecture as relating to particular nations, ancient and modern. As Walker shows, learned Englishmen were determined to discover the best ways of building appropriate to England in the modern age. As elsewhere in seventeenth-century Europe, the elements of the “orders” and “regular” architecture were regarded as the best resources for civilized building.

Walker's argument rests on a hierarchical distinction between learned and artisan architects. This elitist perspective does scant justice to the actual role of artisans in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England. Walker is all too eager to read into his sources an endorsement of the superiority of Ingenio over Manuarius. Vitruvius's distinction between hands-free and hands-on architectural practice was certainly in the minds of contemporaries. Yet Walker presents a quotation from North that evokes the Christian notion of man erecting magnificent buildings from “the slime and filth of the earth” (29) as a statement of social snobbery rather than a recognition of man's earthly capacity for spiritual nobility. The degree to which architectural practice among ingenious architects and trained artisans was relational rather than hierarchical deserves more careful consideration. Walker's sources reflect the particular social context of his subjects. After all, in both the preceding and following generations, the most celebrated talents were often of artisan origin—from Inigo Jones to William Kent. Sir Christopher Wren's top-drawer pedigree was hardly representative of English architects.

Walker's approach to gender is similarly constraining. The decision to exclude learned women ought really to have been justified beyond a simple sigh of regret at an apparent lack of evidence. The men under study would have been aware that Inigo Jones had built for queens Anne of Denmark and Henrietta Maria. Even Wren came of age at the Oxford college planned and built for Dorothy Wadham. Historians have learned to recognize the role of women across the range of early modern cultural activities, and architecture should be no exception. The degree to which architecture was in fact an overwhelmingly male pursuit deserves more careful calibration and explanation than simply assuming that learned women were not interested.

Throughout the book, Walker is careful to determine the exact relationship between learned knowledge and invention—demonstrating how architectural knowledge was communicated in printed treatises, written manuscripts, and direct observation. Particularly illuminating is the evidence for scholarly Englishmen scrutinizing ancient architecture. Martin Lister at York, William Halifax in Palmyra, and Francis Vernon in Athens each highlight the ways in which curious minds went about studying ancient remains. Recognizing the role of sketches and drawings, particularly the significance attached to taking and reporting measurements, Walker shows how reliable records made by learned men were trusted above artistic representations of buildings in pictures and engraved prints. This echoes the ways in which men of letters preferred communication in manuscript over error-prone printed publication. Walker's study is a useful corrective to historical assertions about the role of printed texts in the transmission of architectural knowledge.

Walker's own scholarly practice entails discursive footnotes in dialogue with the main text. For the patient reader, extensive footnoting presents a rewarding and richly suggestive form of scholarship. Such patience is tested through unnecessary repetition and a tendency for significant points to emerge in notes that undercut the main argument. Yet for all my cavils, this is an impressive study. It shows how certain learned English men engaged with architecture to the benefit of their nation. A fuller study of the same subject would treat artisan architects on equal terms and include consideration of women's knowledge of architecture.